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GOING BY THE BOOK |
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AND HIS LEGEND |
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New Gehrig book helps
separate facts and legend
of TheColumnists.com
Image.
That’s what the name of Lou Gehrig
conjures up in the minds of most people, older ones who actually
saw The Iron Horse play for the Yankees more than 65 years ago
and younger ones who know him only through legend.
Gary Cooper’s performance in “The Pride of the Yankees”
in the 1942 film, shown somewhere almost every night now, has
fixed the name and the man in the public mind as solidly as we
remember Lincoln at Gettysburg, FDR in The White House or Lindbergh
over the Atlantic.
I have been a sportswriter for almost 50 years. I never met Gehrig.
I met a lot of sportswriters who covered him throughout his Yankee
career from Fred Leib at the Post, John Drebinger at the Times
and Red Smith at the Herald Tribune to dozens more.
I filled a lot of lazy afternoons in the late 1950s and 1960s
pumping these old sportswriters about the real Gehrig. I didn’t
care much about hearing about Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb or Walter
Johnson.
There was just something fascinating about the Gehrig legend.
The consecutive game streak. The shyness. The short marriage
to Eleanor Twitchell. The early death at the age of 37 of a disease
identified with him now as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. “Gee,”
said Yogi Berra, “isn’t it amazing that he would die
of a disease named after him.”
The stories I would hear about him were not baseball stories
but personal stories. The way he walked. The way he talked. How
strong he was. The strange relationship he had with Ruth.
A Cleveland pitcher by the name of Harry Eisenstat, who happened
to be a cousin of mine, used to tell me tales as a youngster
of arm wrestling with Gehrig every time the Indians played the
Yankees.
"He would just come up to me in the dugout and say, ‘Let’s
wrestle.’ And we would be arm wrestling with 20 guys watching
and he would always put me down. We played them late in 1938
and we arm wrestled. I beat him easily. I knew something was
wrong,” Harry said.
A Wall Street Journal writer named Jonathan Eig has cleared all
the dust around the Gehrig legend with an exhaustive study of
his life in “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig"
(Simon and Schuster, $26), a 420 page documentary on the Yankee
first baseman.
Eig dug through letters, documents, printed material, dozens
of previous books about Gehrig, digested interviews and came
up with a detailed study. I thought it was fair, not fawning,
accurate, not imaginary, careful, not cautious.
Gehrig was a complicated yet simple guy. He loved his mother
more than anyone in the world, including his wife of only eight
years. He admired Ruth but never loved him. He never fully appreciated
his success and had an inferiority complex that would make a
psychiatrist weep.
Gehrig was a dull personality on a team filled with firebrands.
He liked kids and never had any. Eig can’t get the details
on that one. He played every day for 14 years but was a little
bit of a hypochondriac. Bill Dickey, a soft spoken southern catcher,
was his best friend. Gehrig hardly ever had any close friends
on the Yankees or away from the Yankees.
His mother controlled his life tyrannically until his marriage
at the age of 30. His mother and his wife fought for control
of his persona up to and well past his 1941 death.
Eig’s study of Gehrig’s illness, how he fought the
disease, how he challenged the doctors, how he showed enormous
bravery is worth the price of admission. It is technical without
being boring, a literary trick few can accomplish.
Gehrig delivered baseball’s Gettysburg address on July 4,
1939 when he bid farewell to baseball and Yankee fans in between
games of a doubleheader against Washington (the old Senators,
not the new Nationals) before a tearful throng.
Eig claims Gehrig had to be pushed into making the talk (“Today,
Today, I consider myself, I consider myself….”) by
manager Joe McCarthy. That’s hard to buy since old sportswriters
claim they worked with him on the talk. Fred Leib told me he
actually penned it out for Gehrig before Gehrig refined it in
his own words for the crowd. Did Lincoln write his little address
on the back of an envelope on a speeding train?
Legend tends to muddle an image. Gehrig has been all about a
legend over the last 65 years or so. Reality and truth are much
harder to find even when the writer is serious about slicing
the wheat from the chaff as Eig certainly is doing.
Gehrig played cards on those long train rides with teammates
and hated losing. Ruth played cards only for fun. Gehrig believed
his wife slept with Ruth in a ship’s berth on a barnstorming
tour. Ruth denied it. Gehrig never accepted that.
Ruth tried to show Gehrig how much he cared for him on that July
4, 1939 retirement day. Gehrig never really accepted that. The
famous photo has Ruth hugging Gehrig but the feeling wasn’t
mutual.
Eig has filled in lots of the holes in Gehrig’s legend.
Yet, he has also opened up some terrible wounds as he described
the Oedipus angle of Gehrig’s character in intricate detail.
The book is a complicated journey through a tangled life. Gehrig’s
life was successful as he measured it until the tragic ending.
The movie of Gehrig’s life will play on. The tears will
always flow. The image will survive this collection of truths.
Legends really are stronger than life.
©2005 by Maury Allen.
The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The book
cover reproduction is courtesy of Simon & Schuster. This
column first posted on May 16, 2005.
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